Sphinx (7 page)

One morning at the Kormoran, that final stopover for night owls, an old mobster whom I knew and liked rather more than his congeners saw me enter with A***, called me over to his usual spot at the bar, and, after the customary ceremonious greetings, imparted this strange speech, interspersed with knowing winks:

“You know me. I like you. So listen up. All those idiots, they don't know anything. Because they see us chatting fairly often and because I seem to know you pretty well, for a week now they've been coming to me to complain that you're mucking around, that you're out of your mind. That you're foolishly running after that attractive animal there [gesturing toward A***]. You know what they say to me? That it could never work between whites and blacks…And that, furthermore, you two aren't compatible…That one's always dancing, you're always hitting the books. They come to me desperately seeking an explanation…
[He paused to finish his whiskey] But they've got it all wrong, I'm telling you…I've been observing your conquest for two weeks now…And I know what blacks are like…For ten years I've been watching them pass through here…Listen to me: if you keep at it, you will succeed...All those assholes are talking bullshit…Saying that you're lowering yourself! That's what they've been saying to you, right? When you talk to them, they don't absorb anything, and so they can't understand what you see in A***…[He ordered another drink and relit his cigar] But I get what you see…Come back to me in a month and we'll discuss it again. Because it's not at all a lost cause, it just takes a bit of time. Yeah? Turn on the charm! Bring out the violins and
tutti quanti
…It takes time, but you can handle it…Have patience, and by God, you will succeed! And they'll have to eat their words.”

He firmly grasped my hand after finishing his speech, pronounced in his eternally hoarse voice, rolling the gravel of an accent that rendered him incomprehensible to any ear unaccustomed to the deformations he inflicted on his syllables. The high-end escort keeping him company winked while watching me with a slightly alarmed air. Ruggero, as he called himself, was studying me paternally, a cigar wedged between his teeth, gauging my surprise. “Persevere or you'll have me to deal with…When you achieve your victory, the champagne is on me. Don't let yourself be intimidated by the blathering, the scandals, and the bullshit…Now go tend to your love affair.”

I went and found A***, who had no clue about the sermon I had just endured. No doubt others had taken advantage of those ten minutes I had spent with Ruggero to make remarks about how I seemed to want to capture A***'s attention, and more still, at any price. They saw us everywhere together, but no act or gesture allowed them to definitively conclude it had turned into an affair. They didn't know what to believe, and for them that was insufferable. They would have excused
a brisk adventure, without consequence and without tomorrow—what was called in this milieu “getting some ass.” But an attachment that appeared to stem from something other than sex was intolerable.

Ruggero had, however, clumsily formulated what I had been struggling to express myself, without it being, on my part, a conscious project or concerted maneuver. His soliloquy had clarified and simplified the ideas floating around in my head. Indeed, I'm sure that had been his aim. What I was feeling for A*** needed its own embodiment; the pleasure I took in A***'s company demanded its own fulfillment. I wanted A***, it was true, and all my other desires, needs, and plans paled in comparison. Suddenly, the obsessive clamor for amorous possession took hold of me.

I was surprised to find myself desiring, painfully. In a sudden rush of vertigo, I was tantalized by the idea of contact with A***'s skin. I wanted to dismiss, destroy all those who were thronging around A***, keeping this presence from me. I wanted to wrest A*** from their company, from the intrusive glances clinging to us there, and hide us both away. With an unknowingly crazed look, I was always watching this irresistible body. But my gaze was narrowing and stiffening under the tension of carnal desire. That night, A*** was wearing a black silk shirt and white pleated leather pants that showed off a firm behind. A***'s hair, shaved not long ago for the show, was beginning to grow back, materializing as a light shadow. That face, thus restored to its pure nudity, appeared without interference, without anything that could deceptively modify its proportions or veil its imperfections. Its features had retained nothing of A***'s African origins, except for a barely perceptible, sensual heaviness of the mouth.

I don't know what more to say about this body, although I spent hours contemplating it. But that night, my contemplation was exorbitant, quickly twisting into a desire to take possession…A*** noticed my unusual comportment. I made excuses; I didn't dare reveal the reason for
my turmoil and so I was restraining myself from clearly expressing my feelings. I spent the end of that night in a state of incredible confusion: daggers of desire, scattered snippets of conversation, a fragmented vision of A*** dancing were all assailing me in a blur.

We separated on a street corner with the light kiss on the lips that wasn't reserved for me alone. Once home, I was unable to fall asleep, although the night had been, per usual, long and draining. But the exhaustion, which, in the stages of desire, typically follows confused excitation, emptied me of all energy, of even that energy required to sleep. I was turning over in my bed as one might collapse onto a body in the heat of a furious embrace. I was tortured by the memory of A***'s scent, by the residual imprint, barely there, of a shoulder resting against my own this morning as we spoke. The ghost of A***'s presence against mine; a hand poised for a moment on my face, our thighs pressed together in a cramped space. I had the sensation in my flesh of contact with those limbs, no longer there; the effect lingered long after its source had disappeared, retaining the same intensity. A hallucinatory sensation, as if my body had suffered an amputation. This sensation that, even after the split, the separation of our two bodies kept scalding me, kept me awake. I oscillated the entire morning between the rage of embracing only a void, and the memory, the bliss of an instant, of the past night that I was trying so hard mentally to recompose.

Around two in the afternoon, I got out of bed without having slept, prey to a mixture of despair and exhaustion. Wandering the apartment aimlessly, the shutters closed, I declaimed in an incoherent monologue all that passed through my head for the next two hours. The sound of the telephone, which rang right in the middle of my vociferations, terrified me. I knew who was calling, but I was afraid of answering and betraying my nervousness. Nonetheless, I answered it and managed to control
myself for long enough to agree to meet A*** around six o'clock at the Café de Flore.

As soon as we hung up, I hurriedly started getting ready. In the shower, I promised myself twenty times that I would declare my passion that night in no uncertain terms, which I immediately began to assemble and articulate. Looking at myself in the mirror, I swore when I saw the bags under my eyes, which were much worse than usual. Then I wasted a good twenty minutes wondering what clothes to wear on this solemn occasion; I wanted to look my best, which, normally, was the least of my concerns. Look good! Look good! The idea suddenly made me shrug. I observed my naked form displayed in the mirror: was it really that important how I chose to veil my nudity? Since I had lost weight (the mirror confirmed this), my clothes, which I always wore a bit loose, had become rather baggy. I surveyed my wardrobe, still unable to decide what to wear. In a sudden fury to be done with this inner debate on the uselessness of artifice, I grabbed the first pair of pants and the first shirt to fall into my hands. I pulled on my usual leather jacket and left in a rush from the apartment, dreading a late arrival to this decisive rendezvous.

Before A*** brought me there, I had never stepped foot in the Café de Flore. I held a sort of prejudice against this place that stemmed from an old image of the 1950s to which it was for me indissolubly linked. My aversion to this distressing, foul-smelling intellectualism—also known as “existentialism”—was combined with my distrust of these clichéd spaces where public notoriety summons a hybrid species of artists and intellectuals. That they packed together there didn't imply that the place was in good taste; quite the opposite, their presence foretold an undeniable unpleasantness.

Contrary to the theological idea that if I value the Creator very highly,
I can't admire His creation or honor His creature, when a work of art moved me to the highest point I could only comparatively disparage the author once he or she was relegated to the dismal banality of this café.

To mix with company that derives its life force from the desire to show off is to confine oneself to the enslavement of the ogler; I was disgusted by this pagan and idolatrous Mass, its adepts, its servants, and its totems. And so when I crossed the threshold of this temple for the first time, I wasn't surrendering to its obscene cult, but to desire alone, and to the deliberate invitation of A*** who, living close by, enjoyed tanning on the terrace in the summer. The perverse effect of A***'s presence was the only thing that made this café tolerable. A***'s tendency to constantly act as if on a stage relegated me to the wings or to the coatroom, which suited me perfectly. As soon as I infiltrated the Flore, I reduced myself to being nothing but a sort of understudy; and only this rather particular statute, which exempted me from the widespread and monstrous fury of recognition, allowed me to show myself without showing off myself.

That evening, without a glance at the audience, I steered myself toward a table tucked to the side where I always insisted on sitting, and where A*** was waiting for me. The proclamations that I had debated nonstop en route crystallized unexpectedly at the sight of A***, and I abruptly broached the subject close to my heart, as if to get it out of the way. A declaration of love is always tedious; it exceeded my patience to dilute the exasperation of my passion in a detailed statement, to represent discursively the unbearable confusion of my immediate desire— tolerating neither delay nor explanation, so much did its urgency torment me. My intentions were clear; my speech only muddled and veiled them in incoherence. I was alternating aimlessly between snippets of narration, the minutes of my interior monologue, syllogisms and images, passing without transition from slang to high style and from the trivial to the
abstract, without ever finding the right tone or genre in which to deliver my words. A*** was taken aback by this unprecedented bout of garrulous, confused violence.

A***'s response to the declaration I proved incapable of making was, however, perfectly clear. Its essence could be summarized with a single verdict: “You must not love me”—an attempt to claim that A*** was unworthy of my passion and that it would damage our friendship. A***'s propensity had always been to refrain from passionate attachments of the flesh, attachments that, once broken by misfortune, betrayal, or accident, resulted in prejudicial excesses of sadness. Consequently, A*** thought it wise to disavow the idea of amorous possession, which could do nothing but exacerbate my confusion and forbid us from returning thereafter to that honest friendship, that guarantee of stability, to which we would be better off confining ourselves.

That response, the arguments used to justify A***'s refusal, were attempts to disorient me; in fact they did nothing but accentuate even more the imperative violence of my desire. They also left room for debate. All of the notions of love A***'s reasoning invoked seemed erroneous to me, and I set about proving it. Those reasons were only a pretext; I wanted the truth. I was ranting, using cunning to obtain it, and seeing that the facts were being concealed from me, I brazenly concluded that they must have been in my favor. We spent the night discussing, disputing the erroneous fables used to justify A***'s refusal, and the valid reasons for my desire. Through every tone I modulated the absolute demand and legitimacy of my passion.

In return, A*** took refuge behind a moderation far from the habitual impulsiveness to which I was accustomed. That night the inversion was complete: I made myself into a demon, and A*** symmetrically put on the mask of the angel that I had abandoned. A***'s final argument,
pronounced on the threshold of the Eden, was of this order: “I rely on your friendship, and a physical relationship would annihilate it irremediably; so you must not love me, for such a relationship would be hellish. Don't ask of me what I'm unable to give you without the risk of letting you down.” I relate neither the exact terms of this plea—they were much more trivial—nor the precise progression of A***'s personal logic, which was much less clearly defined. And I cannot relate them simply because A*** never formulated a link between successive sentences. From an unorganized mass of statements, of partial notes and arguments, I managed to extract a line of reasoning, a collection of synthetic propositions that I subsequently reiterated to verify their accuracy. For example, the following assertions emitted more than an hour apart: “If I agree to sleep with you, things won't be the same afterward;” and, “I'm ill-tempered, no one tolerates me for long;” and, “We can't sleep together, we'll end up fighting because neither of us will want to let the other take the lead.” I concluded implicitly that A***, only able to imagine love as a system of power relations, could only envisage our relationship as a battle, leading irremediably to a violent rupture. I had to translate and arrange every word so that they became intelligible to me. Add to this some misunderstandings stemming from different mother tongues, and perhaps one can grasp the difficulty of my enterprise.